Absolute Outsider
by Leonidas701
Summary: Kokoa Shuzen came to Youkai Academy to free her sister from her curse, not to get lectured at for eight hours a day. Still, even ignoring the teacher, there are some things she notices in class. The biggest is the foreigner in the class who can barely speak japanese and does nothing in response to being bullied. Nothing for her to spare a second thought on. Or so she thought.
1. Chapter 1

_How stupid does this school think I am?_ thought Kokoa Shuzen. She was paying just enough attention to the teacher to be annoyed by him. _How do they plan out these lessons? 'Yes, I know my students are high-schoolers, but that doesn't_ necessarily _mean that they went to middle school, right? Clearly, I need to teach them how to multiply fractions.'_

Kokoa sighed. Not even mentally mocking her teacher could make her feel anything. She had long since run out of ways to entertain herself. She had tried planning a way to get her sister freed from her rosary, but she wasn't able to come up with anything, though she was planning to visit her at the newspaper room later for ideas. She had played with her pencil, trying to make it balance on her desk or her finger, but gave up when she realized how pointless it was. She had tried cloud watching, but on such a nothing of a wednesday like this even water droplets couldn't motivate themselves to condense beyond a few wisps. She even tried paying attention to the teacher for a few seconds before realizing what she was doing and shaking herself back to sanity. The only thing keeping her head from colliding with her desk out of total apathy was her arm, propping her up and tilting her chin to keep her looking out the window, the sight of the dead, unmoving woods around Youkai Academy still more entertaining than anything in the classroom.

 _Why do they keep on teaching us these things over and over again?_ she thought. _If you're gonna make us learn, at least have us learn something new._ Kokoa sighed, the act making her neck twinge a bit. She had had her head turned for so long that it was starting to ache. Kokoa knew what this meant. Kokoa briefly thought about just letting her neck seize up to get out of class for a few days, but realized that that would mean she would have less opportunities to free her big sister. _Damn it._ Kokoa reluctantly switched the arm holding her head up for her left one, making her face into the classroom.

As she scanned the boring, brown room, out of a desperate hope that something had miraculously appeared on the blank walls above the sea of green uniforms. An amusing comic, an inspiring quote, a firing squad come to take her out of her misery, but no. It was as drab and lifeless as it was a week ago when she first entered the room.

 _Figures I get the one teacher in this school with less personality than his desk._ Kokoa glared at the balding, middle-aged man droning about math with his back to his students. Kokoa's gaze now turned to those students. Her peers, all seeming equally as or more bored than she was as she swept her gaze from the front of the room to the back. That is, until she came across a bizarre phenomenon.

One student, a boy who seemed just a bit too tall for the school desk he was occupying, was diligently taking notes. Or trying to, given the look of confusion on his face. He had a black rectangle with a tiny light on it on his desk next to his pens. Four pens, all a different color.

Kokoa tried to remember why this one student, out of all worthless peons in her class, stood out in her memory. She smirked as the memory bubbled up.

 _Oh yeah, the spineless foreigner._ Kokoa drifted off into her memory of the second day of school.

The teacher had been lecturing. Kokoa couldn't remember what it was about, she wasn't paying attention; and given the unmoving monotone the teacher was speaking in she had serious doubts that she was the only one. There was almost something relaxing about it, between the teacher's lack of caring and equally dispassionate responses from the students he selected at random to answer his questions. It was a nice hum of white noise in the background of Kokoa's daydreams, unchanging and never ceasing until the teacher called on the foreigner.

Then called on him again to make the foreigner realize that he was being spoken to. Then, once he responded, the teacher had to repeat the question to him. And again, slower so the foreigner could understand it.

The foreigner frantically flipped through his notes, speaking one nervous, uncertain word at a time, stuttering and correcting himself in such a thick american accent that Kokoa could barely understand him even when his sentence started to make sense. It was taking him so long that the teacher eventually told him to sit down and called on somebody else as the foreigner flushed and quickly sat back down in embarrassment.

Then, when the teacher told them all to study amongst themselves for a little bit, another boy came up the foreigner's desk as he poured through his notes and took one of his pens. Five minutes had gone by before the foreigner had noticed it was missing. He looked around the room and saw the other boy sitting at their desk, twirling his pen between his fingers.

The foreigner got up, after spending a minute writing on a piece of paper, and walked over to the other boy. He read from the paper, telling the boy that the pen must have fallen off his desk and requesting it be returned. The boy refused. The foreigner asked again, the boy told him to take it, throwing it at his chest and catching it on the way back.

The foreigner turned around and went to the teacher's desk, only for the teacher to send him back to his desk, telling him that his missing pen wasn't any of his business. The foreigner hung his head and went back to his desk, pulling an identical pen out of his bag and writing with that.

Since then, the bully and the foreigner had been Kokoa's sole source of amusement in class, as the bully began harassing him more and more, even flicking and poking him. The foreigner took all of that and just ignored him. He had long since given up trying to get the teacher's help.

 _What kind of Z-Rank monster must he be to take all that abuse without even trying to retaliate?_ Kokoa thought. _Is he a slime? A kappa? He's western, maybe a pixie. Or a furby, I think that's one of those weird monster types they have in the west. What an embarrassment. He would've been better off at one of those human schools. Maybe he couldn't get into one. Not even they wanted to take him, they could sense his weakness._

Kokoa would have gone on, but suddenly the teacher's voice rose above a whisper over the hilltops. "On that note, I will now assign you all into groups for this project. Pay attention as I won't remind any of you where I have placed you. Once you are all together, I will give you your formula. You have until next friday to find a way to explain it simply to the rest of the class."

Kokoa listened to her name get called and placed in a group with three people whose names she didn't bother asking. As she moved over to them she looked at the clock. One hour left. Sixty more minutes she had to deal with this. _Something exciting had better happen after class_ , she thought as she pretended to care about their plan to work on the project.

 **-Later That Day-**

Kokoa was glad that there was no one else around her as she walked along a dirt path through Youkai Academy's dead woods. She didn't think she could keep the smile off of her face, or the spring out of her steps. Not only had she gotten to see her sister, her real sister, again, she got to watch as she ground the doppelganger into dust.

 _Yes, yes!_ Kokoa thought as she replayed the fight- no, the _beatdown_ in her mind, still in awe at her sister's strength and beauty. _That is how a vampire should be!_ It more than made up for her getting captured and held with that weak, pathetic, idiot of a human. Then she remembered what happened afterwards. All her previous smiles and jubilation were replaced with a frown and anger. _Why?! Why on earth did she go back to being that- that weakling! It must be a curse, something happened to her mind! Don't worry sister, I will save you!_ Kokoa's concentration was suddenly broken when she heard something in the forest. _What's that?_ she thought as she went towards it, figuring that in the worst case scenario it would be something she could take her anger out on.

When she got closer she started to recognize it. It was the voice of her teacher, but weird. As she concentrated on it, the most attention she had ever put on that voice, she noticed that it seemed to be repeating. More specifically, repeating that day's lecture. This intrigued Kokoa, again, a first for anything relating to her teacher. She kept following it until she came across someone sitting on a tree stump, with a pen in one hand, a notebook in the other, a black rectangle in their lap and a green school jacket on the ground behind them. Taking a closer look, Kokoa realized that she was looking at the spineless foreigner. In her brief glance, she saw him touch the rectangle and the voice stopped. She realized that it was a tape recorder.

Kokoa stifled a laugh. His japanese was so bad that he actually needed to record the lectures and translate them later. It almost made her feel sorry for him, no one should need to hear those twice, let alone multiple times. She watched as frustration contorted his face more and more as he repeated the same segment of tape over and over, trying to make out the teacher's quiet voice.

The foreigner let out a throaty scream and whipped his pen at a nearby tree. Kokoa covered her laugh and shook her head. She decided to leave him to his misery. She turned around and started to walk away.

After she took two steps, her body locked up, so fast that it took her a second to realize what had spooked her so badly. Her eyes widened, her heart raced, and her breath shook as she was hit by one of the biggest waves of youkai she had ever felt. She dropped down into a battle stance, turning her bat into a baseball bat as her eyes darted from left to right, trying to find the source. She looked deep into the forest, she looked up, she even tried checking underground, nothing.

Her eyes, already impossibly wide now threatened to pop out of her skull as she realized what the only remaining possibility was. _No. No_. _It can't be,_ Kokoa thought as she slowly looked back over her shoulder, willing her eyes to unfocus to avoid actually seeing it. But eventually, grudgingly, they focused.

Just in time for her to watch the source of the youkai get up and recover the pen it had just thrown.


	2. Chapter 2

Kokoa yawned again, her arms stretching out high above her head as she looked at the classroom clock for the fourth time in half as many minutes, not even bothering to actually take note of the time. She couldn't look out the window, because she had been forced to move her desk. The teacher had chosen to let the class split off into their project teams, and bring their desk along with them, for the last half-hour of class; a move that had left the classroom divided between those who were trying to cram as much work into their projects as they could in the time they had, and the group that was just waiting for the day to be over already.

"Are you even listening to me?!" said one of the girls in Kokoa's team.

Kokoa didn't even adjust from her stretching position, instead only flicking her eyes down towards the girl as she said, "No."

The girl growled in annoyance, but Kokoa had stopped paying attention to her. As Kokoa tried to find a way to amuse herself for the last few minutes of class, she found her attention unwillingly returning to the foreigner, as it had been for the entire day. Ever since she had gotten to class that day, her brain had been tearing itself apart with frustration. It seemed fundamentally wrong to her, so much raw youkai in a body that refused to even attempt the most token of defense against such abuse.

At this moment, the abuse was coming from his teammates, two guys and a girl. She didn't turn to look at them, knowing it would simply be unseemly for a vampire such as herself to seem to be taking so much interest in the affairs of lesser beings. Instead, she focused her vampiric hearing on the group, allowing her to make out the conversation.

"Oh, come on, Gaijin!" said one of the guys, speaking unnecessarily fast. "It's not so difficult, you just need to move the factors from that trinomial over here!" There was a quiet thump that Kokoa assumed came from one of the guys poking a paper on his desk.

"I… sorry, what was that word?" said the foreigner, reciting his most practiced sentence.

The other guy let out an exaggerated sigh. "He said, 'Iiiiit iiiis nooooot'," he said, dragging out every syllable as he repeated the words of his comrade in bullying. It took him several seconds to repeat the sixteen words, after which the foreigner spoke again.

"One second, please." Kokoa heard the flipping of pages, she assumed they were coming from his notebook as he looked up the words that were said.

"Hey!" said the first guy again. Kokoa heard a sharp tap. "Eyes up, Gaijin, we're talking to you!" The foreigner's breathing got considerably more ragged.

"Really, disrespecting us in our own country." The other guy tsked.

"Hey," said the girl, "Don't be too hard on him. I bet it's hard for him, being away from his home country. What happened," she said, her voice dripping with false sympathy. "Your own people didn't want you so they paid the Academy to take you off their hands?"

Kokoa, along with the rest of the class, flinched as they heard a loud slam echo throughout the room. They all turned as one to look at what was happening. Kokoa turned fast enough to watch the guy in the center of the group of harassers flinch and quickly recover as the foreigner stood up and lifted his recently-slammed hand off of his desk.

The bully turned to his friends. "Oh, watch out!" he said, "The gaijin is angry." He turned back to the foreigner. "What are you gonna do about it?" He flicked his pen at the foreigner's forehead, where there was already a small red welt. The foreigner grabbed the pen out of the air. One of his fists started to clench as he took long, slow breaths through his teeth. After a few seconds, his hand relaxed. He dropped the pen onto the bully's desk before turning around and walking to the teacher's at the front of the classroom. As he walked up the room, the rest of the class went back to doing what they were before, disappointed at the anti-climax.

Kokoa leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, much to the annoyance of her team. As she did this, she just so _happened_ to hear the conversation between the teacher and the foreigner.

"I would leave my group," said the foreigner. "I feel they no do well with I."

Kokoa heard the teacher's papers jostle as he looked up, surprised at being acknowledged before it was time for the class to be dismissed. Any surprise that he felt failed to reach his voice, as he spoke in the same dead monotone as always. "I apologize that you think you are holding the group back, but I am afraid that I can not place you in another. It is likely that you will drag them down the same as the group you are currently in, so either way a group is left with a disadvantage."

Kokoa heard the soft rustle of fabric that she assumed to be the foreigner patting his own chest. "I work with myself."

Kokoa nearly fell out her chair as the teacher's voice managed to convey an emotion. "Are you sure?" he said with a note of curiosity. "I will still have to grade your project as though it were being worked on by a full group of four."

"Yes," the foreigner said confidently. Kokoa took this opportunity to get out of her chair and walk to the teacher's desk.

"Well, if you are certain," said the teacher, "I suppose I can fit you in on presentation day. Yes, Ms. Shuzen?"

Kokoa stood before the teacher, elbowing the foreigner out of her way. "Wait, if he gets to work alone, then I want to too!" she said. "Those idiots you placed me with are only a burden on me. I'd rather be working alone than having to carry them."

The teacher responded, his voice back to a monotone. "Ms. Shuzen, it is inappropriate for you to refer to your classmates in such a way," Kokoa rolled her eyes, "and I am afraid that as punishment you will be the one cleaning the classroom today. Anyways, regardless of your personal feelings towards them, we do not have enough time for another solo presentation. So," the teacher gestured at the foreigner, "Unless you wish to work with Mr.-"

"Fine," Kokoa said, turning to look the foreigner up and down. "He's got to be better than them." She jerked her head back at her old group.

"Very well."

The foreigner looked back and forth between the two of them with a confused look on his face. He opened his mouth, only to be cut off by the teacher.

"In fact, as her new partner, it is only right that you aid her in cleaning the room today after dismissal."

"Wha-"

"Class dismissed!" the teacher said, cutting off the foreigner as he stood up and got out of the class just fast enough to avoid being trampled by the outpouring wave of fifteen-year olds; leaving the class devoid of all life except for a mildly annoyed vampire, a slightly confused foreigner, and the joyous magical bat that sprung out of the vampire's backpack to flap around the room.

Kokoa's attention turned to Kou, waving him over to her until she was reminded of why she was so eager to stay even longer in class.

"Um," said the foreigner, "What did he ju-"

"What's wrong with you?" Kokoa asked, turning to look at him like he was a dollar that refused to flatten enough to be accepted by a vending machine.

"Uh, one second, please." The foreigner reached into his pocket and started to pull something out.

Kokoa rolled her eyes in as wide of a circle as she could force while she sighed in exasperation. "What is wrong with you?" she said in flawless, annoyed, english.

The foreigner almost dropped the thing he was pulling out of his pocket. Once he was done scrambling to grab it before it fell to the ground, he looked up at Kokoa, eye's wide and mouth open. "Y- You speak english?" he said in his home tongue.

Kokoa smiled smugly. "Of course I can. Did you really a proud vampire like myself would have issues speaking such a simple, base language?" Kokoa left out the fact that it took years of sadistic drilling and several forceful prompts from her mother to become as fluent as she was.

"Oh," he said lamely. "Okay." The foreigner hastily straightened up and coughed to cover his embarrassment. "So, uh, what was Mr. Akawa talking about?"

 _Is that his name?_ Kokoa thought. "He said that you have been awarded the honor and the privilege of working under me for the duration of the assignment."

"I could've sworn he said something about cleaning," the foreigner said as he headed back to his desk.

"Oh yeah, we're also supposed to clean up the classroom." Kokoa looked at the ground next to her and saw a sheet of paper. She picked it up, crumpled it in her hands, and threw it out the window. "There, the class has officially been cleaned. Now, back to more important matters; what is wrong with you? What kind of monster just sits there and takes that kind of abuse?!"

"What do you mean." The foreigner was half-listening to her as he packed things into his backpack.

Kokoa was starting to get frustrated. "I mean, what they were doing to you in class! I don't care how badly you speak Japanese, there is _no_ way you didn't understand them talking to you with that tone, or hitting you on the forehead! Why didn't you strike back at them?"

"Oh," the foreigner said in a tone that suggested he knew damn well what she meant, but had hoped it was something else. "I can't." He started rooting around in his desk.

"What!?" Kokoa couldn't believe her ears. "What do you mean you can't! Why not, are you too weak or just a cow-"

"I just can't, ok!" the foreigner yelled, looking up from his desk to glare at her. "Now drop it." He returned his attention back to his desk. "Please."

Kokoa stunned for half a second. Then, her face morphed into a mask of rage. _That does it!_ she thought as she extended her arm and turned Kou into a baseball bat. _I don't care how much youkai you have, you will learn to never speak to a vampire like that ever aga-_

"OW!" The foreigner's hand shot out of his desk and straight to his mouth. "Mother Fu- Agh!" His hand was bleeding. He took it away from his face and looked into his desk. "Oh, those little bastards!" He kept speaking, but Kokoa didn't hear any of it.

It started when she saw the red of free-flowing blood, stopping her in her tracks. Then, the smell hit her. Her grip on the bat loosened until it slipped out of her hand, just barely managing to turn back into a bat and flap away before it hit the ground. All her faculties were focused on that smell. The most mouth-watering thing she had ever smelt in all her fifteen years.

Her mouth hung open and began to fill with saliva as her thoughts emptied themselves of words and instead became a swirling vortex of desire.

Meanwhile, the foreigner was cursing up a storm. "Those slimy, mother fucking, sons of bitch-pussies!" He pulled a long strip of metal out of his desk. "They must have stuck this thing in while I was talking to Mr. Akawa! Gah!" There was a brief, intense flare of youkai as he twisted and crumbled the blade into a crude sphere. The shock was enough to snap Kokoa mostly out of her reverie, enough to respond to him. Kind of.

"Hey," he said. "Could you toss me that box of tissues?"

"Uhh?" Kokoa said. She realized what kind of state she was in and quickly snapped back to form, turning her face away from the foreigner so he didn't see her blush in embarrassment.

Following the bizarre display, the foreigner snapped out, "Nevermind, I'll get them myself." He proceeded to do that, bringing the smell closer to Kokoa, and began mopping up the blood with the tissues.

"I don't care!" Kokoa said, trying to save face. "I'm leaving!" She tried to flee the classroom before her stomach growled, quickly collecting her books and bag.

"Hey! We still need to work on the project!" the foreigner called after her. "You wanna just head to the library now?"

Kokoa didn't even risk glancing over her shoulder, afraid that he might see the drool. "What! No! I actually have a life, and things to do! Try going to the library at eight, I _might_ be there and honor you with my assistance on this stupid thing!" She said all this in a rush as she threw everything into her bag and ran out the door, leaving a very annoyed, bleeding American alone in the classroom. "Don't hold your breath, I am very busy!"

 **-Later, in the Newspaper Club-**

Kokoa was very bored. Her big plan for the day, trying to get her big sister's curse off of her by turning Kou into a crowbar and prying the chain apart, had failed, and now she was forced to sit at a desk and watch the pink-haired thing stare longingly into the eyes of a human. It was enough to make herself sick, just listening to them. She could recite it from memory. First the boy...

"Moka…"

Then the girl…

"Tsukune…"

Repeat three more times, never changing your tone of voice.

"Moka…"

"Tsukune…"

"Moka…"

"Tsukune…"

"Moka…"

"Tsukune…"

Then three different things could happen. The pinkette could dive for his neck, the succubus could come in and try to prove her love for him by driving him to the brink of death via oxygen deprivation, or-

 ***Thunk*** Or, option three, an ice kunai to the forehead.

"Hey!" said the succubus. "It's bad enough that Moka takes Tsukune's blood, you don't need to make him lose more Mizore!"

"I- I'm sorry, Tsukune." ***Capu chuu***

Kokoa sighed and buried her head in her arms. Than, something happened. Tsukune's blood drifted over to her. As the smell filled her nostrils, she found she didn't have to try nearly as hard as usual to not attach herself to the other side of his neck as she normally did. It went from smelling fantastic and pure, to smelling as sterile as the blood packs she forced herself to drink in the morning. This line of thought brought her mind back a couple of hours, to the dripping red essence leaking from the foreigner. Just thinking about the spicy, savory-sweet smell nearly made her stomach growl. It had been consistently in her head since she had left the classroom; She couldn't get it out as it taunted her and made her tastebuds cry and beg to be engulfed by it. Kokoa knew there was only one thing that could make it stop, and was willing to do anything to make it happen.

She grabbed her bag stood up from her desk. The pinkette stopped trying to wrench the human away from the other girls for a few seconds when she heard the door open.

"Where are you going, Kokoa?" asked Moka.

"To the library." _I need that blood!_


	3. Chapter 3

Kokoa had sprinted almost all the way from the newspaper room to the library. She had planned on just walking there, telling herself that it didn't matter all that much if she did not get the foreigner's blood that night. After all, she was going to have several more chances to get it later as they were working on the project together. Then, she happened to see a clock on the wall, and saw that it was ten minutes past eight pm. Next thing she knew, her legs were pumping like her life depended on it.

She finally reached the library door and was about to throw it open, if not rip it off its hinges entirely, when she caught herself. She realized that she was panting like a dog, her uniform was disheveled, and her face was probably flushed bright red from her exhaustion. The mere thought of her, a member of the vampire elite, being seen in that state was enough to make her feel sick. She took a few seconds to calm down a bit and straighten out her skirt and vest. Then, she calmly, in a manner befitting a vampire, opened the door. She ignored the loud thump as the door hit the wall.

She went into the library, weaving her way around the long tables meant for group work and the enclosed desks where students were meant to work on their own, going past the two or three easy chairs and looking down each row of bookshelves for the foreigner. Then, she made her way through it all a second time. And a third. Kokoa told herself that the reason for the faster pace of her heart was because she was angry at the prospect of being held up by such a nobody.

As she was looking through the length and breadth of the library for the fifth time, she heard footsteps approaching the library door. Kokoa's eyes widened and she quickly composed herself, again, making it look like she was just casually browsing the bookshelf she was in front of. She looked at the door as it slowly opened.

It took Kokoa a little bit to realize who was coming in, they had changed out of their uniform and into a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, but she soon recognised them as the foreigner.

"You're late!" Kokoa yelled irritably, louder than she probably needed to. She realized who she was yelling at and switched languages. "You are late!" she yelled in english.

"Oh, so you did come," said the foreigner. "Cool, now we can get to work." He went over to one of the long tables and sat at the side about three feet away from the wall.

"What took you so long?!" Kokoa asked. "You are _so_ lucky I'm still here! I should've left as soon as I saw you weren't here at eight on the dot!" Even as she berated him, she moved over to the desk the foreigner had selected, placing her bag on the ground and sitting down across from him.

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry," said the foreigner as he reached into his bag. "But I wasn't exactly going to rush to meet up with someone who had told me they might not be there." He pulled out a textbook and a notebook. As he did so, Kokoa caught sight of the hand he had cut open, its palm now buried under a layer of bandages. Her eyes lingered on it as it reminded her of why she was going to all this trouble. The foreigner noticed her gaze. "Oh, yeah. It wouldn't stop, so I figured I should go the nurse and get it checked out. She bandaged it up for me." Kokoa offered no response, but he didn't seem to expect one as he reached back into his backpack. "Now," he said as he pulled out a water bottle and placed it on the desk next to him. "Let's get to work on this thing." He opened the bottle up and took a drink, allowing Kokoa to remember that there was a reason he had wanted to meet with her.

She groaned as he opened up the textbook and they got to work.

 **-Two Hours Later-**

"Okay," said the foreigner, responding to Kokoa's idea on how to simplify the formula. He looked into his notebook. "I'll have to check if that works- Oh, wow." He looked at the wallclock above him. "Tomorrow by the looks of it."

"What?" Kokoa asked, forcing the grogginess from her voice.

"Well," the foreigner pointed at the clock, "it's past ten, for one. And for two, I just noticed that for the last five minutes, I've been drawing smiley faces in my notebook instead of what we were talking about."

"Yeah, sure." Kokoa was only barely paying attention to him. Throughout the discussion, she had only been contributing enough to keep him from getting the impression she was a slacker while she tried to think of a way to convince him to give her his blood. After constant covert glances at his cut and sharp reminders of the smell that had driven her to this point, she had finally come up with an idea. _Will he go for it?_ she asked herself. _Don't be stupid! Of course he will! How could he possibly refuse a deal like this from a vampire elite like you!_

Thus bolstered, Kokoa put her plan into action. "So, what are you gonna do about them?" she asked as she gestured at his bandaged hand.

"Check my desk before I stick my hand into it from now on," said the foreigner.

Kokoa knew it was coming, but she still couldn't believe her ears. "And that's it?" she blurted out. "If someone had tried to do something like that to me, pieces of them would be found all over the dorms!"

"Yeah, well, I don't exactly have that option!" he snapped. "What do you care anyways?" he went back to packing his bag.

"Hmph," went Kokoa. The vampire pulled a face like a mildly interesting idea had just struck her. "You know, I might be able to help you."

The foreigner looked at her skeptically.

Kokoa explained. "The frozen blood packs this school provides me are garbage, unfit even for a leech, let alone a vampire, _let alone_ a vampire of my standing. I deserve warm, fresh blood. If you give me yours, then I'll deal with the people who bother you." She suddenly realized what she sounded like. "D- don't think I'd do this kind of thing normally!" she hastily added. "Be thankful the school's food is so terrible, otherwise I'd never even consider taking blood from you!"

The foreigner looked unimpressed by her offer and Kokoa felt a pang of worry. _Oh shit, what if I insulted him? Stupid, stupid, what are you thinking! Who cares if you insulted him! It doesn't matter, he'll still-_ Kokoa's thoughts were cut off as she saw him open his mouth in a way that made it clear he was about to reject her. Kokoa thought quickly.

"In fact," she said, trying to sweeten the deal. "Since I'd have to be seen around you to do that, I'll probably have to teach you a little japanese. It wouldn't do for me to be in the company of someone who can only barely speak to anyone else!" _I hope that was enough._

The foreigner still looked unimpressed and Kokoa tried her best to look as unconcerned as possible while her mind raced to try and think of anything else she could offer him. She had hit a brick wall when suddenly the foreigner spoke.

"Alright. You deal with the assholes who bug me, and help tutor me, and I'll give you some of my blood."

Kokoa hid her sigh of relief. "Good choice," she said, forcing an aloof tone. "Let's say, I take blood from you whenever you need me to protect you."

"No." Kokoa kept her panicked reaction away from her face as the foreigner spoke. "I can't give up that much blood a day. How about, once a day, anytime after school."

"...Fine," Kokoa said. "And I'll take my first payment right now."

Now it was the foreigner's turn to look shocked. "Now?"

"Yes!" Kokoa said grumpily.

"Uhm… Okay. Do you want me to get a needle from the nurse or someth-"

"What?!" Kokoa screamed. She saw the foreigner step back a bit and calmed herself down. She couldn't screw this up, not when she was so close. She just had to taste the blood once, see that it was nothing special, and forget the agreement ever happened. She controlled her voice and spoke. "I am a proud vampire of the Shuzen line. I do not! Take blood from a needle." The blood packs didn't count. They were barely food. "I take it straight from the source." Kokoa stared at his neck, ignoring the saliva building up in her mouth.

"What? I mean..." the foreigner shifted around nervously as he saw her gaze. He rubbed his neck. "Isn't that going to hurt?"

Kokoa rolled her eyes and suppressed a growl in frustration. She quickly reached out and pinched him, making him flinch. "It hurts less than that. Now, stand up and come here!"

He got up and walked over to Kokoa's side of the desk. Kokoa stood up as well, nearly throwing her chair back in anticipation. It was only now, standing directly in front of him, her eyes level with the bottom of his chest, that she realized exactly how tall the foreigner actually was.

A couple of awkward seconds passed. "Is… there a problem?" asked the foreigner.

"No!" Kokoa snapped through her teeth, unable to hold back her irritability at this new obstacle when her goal was all but in hand, well, in mouth. "You're too tall!"

"I'm five foot eleven, you japanese are all just really short!" he said in defense.

Kokoa forced down the urge to hit him for calling her short, even non-specifically. _Your blood had better taste like the nectar of the gods!_

"Do you want me to bend down a bit?" he asked.

"Don't patronize me." Kokoa stretched her neck out as high as it could go, but it wasn't enough. She slowly stood up until she was on the very tips of her toes, only to find that she was less than a centimeter out of reach of his vein. The foreigner bent down very awkwardly, covering the remaining distance. As soon as it was in range, Kokoa pounced.

 ***Capu chuu***

The instant the blood touched her tongue, Kokoa's eyes shot wide open. Her every nerve was on fire, pleasure rushed through her body like electricity as she gulped it down. She began to lean on the foreigner's body as her knees slowly gave way. She was distantly aware of the fact she was being yelled at, but she didn't care as she took more and more blood into her system. Then she felt a very painful shock on her leg, making her teeth release their bite.

As soon as she had let go, the foreigner leapt over to other side of the table and pressed himself against the wall. With no more support, Kokoa fell flat onto her ass, only barely registering the drop as she swished the last mouthful of blood around in her mouth.

"What in the hell was that!" yelled the foreigner as he quickly reached out to stand his water bottle back up. It had fallen over when he was moving around, yelling at Kokoa to let go. some of its contents had landed onto her leg. As soon as it was upright, he went back to leaning against the wall to compensate for his wooziness due to having just lost a pint and a half of blood. He clasped one hand over the bite marks on his neck as he shouted at Kokoa. "What is wrong with you?!"

Kokoa could barely hear him as she gulped down the last of the blood. "That was… Really… Really… Really," she said in between gasps as she waited for her eyes to focus.

"What!?" Kokoa had started speaking japanese again.

As her mental haze began to clear up, Kokoa became acutely aware of what kind of state she was in. She leapt to her feet and turned her nose up to hide her blush. She took a step towards the table, making the foreigner recoil and press himself further into the wall.

"Stay away from me!" he said.

Kokoa looked at him condescendingly and sat back down at the table. "Oh, calm down." She had gone back to english. "It's not like I'm going to jump you." It's not that the urge wasn't there, to throw the table out of the way and attach herself back to his neck, but Kokoa knew she had to play it smart.

"It feels like you nearly drained me!"

"Oh please." She flipped her hair. "If I wanted all your blood, I'd have it right now."

This realization made the foreigner calm down a little, though he still didn't sit back down. Kokoa could feel his nervousness, but now that she had tasted his blood she wasn't going to give it up so easily. She tried to make him feel comfortable.

"Look, you're already so much weaker than me, that I can't tell when you get weaker," she said. "So, from now on, if you feel I'm taking too much, just push me off." Kokoa laughed briefly as a thought struck her. "You should be happy, not many men get to put their hands on me."

The foreigner made a sarcastic face at her. "I'm flattered, but I can't," he said.

"What? Look, I'm giving you permission-"

"It's not a matter of permission, I just can't!"

"What?" Kokoa loudly said. "I won't even put any force into staying on, are you so weak that-"

The foreigner cut her off angrily, finally peeling away from the wall and advancing towards her. "Look, if I wanted to, I coul-!" He took a deep breath and stopped in his tracks. He clenched his eyelids shut and turned his face towards the ceiling. After another deep breath, he began explaining his predicament. "If I perform any physically aggressive action towards another student, faculty member, or otherwise sentient being, for any reason whatsoever, up to and including self-defense, it will result in immediate expulsion from Youkai Academy and its campus."

Kokoa was shocked. "What? Why on earth would-"

"It was the only way the school would accept me! Well, that and one other thing," he said to the side. He tried to change the subject. "So, yeah, me pushing you off won't work. Any other ideas?"

Kokoa was lost. She couldn't believe it. To be in Youkai Academy, where the average student got into at least five fights before the end of their first year, and not be allowed to throw a punch. But, even worse that that, that stupid rule was keeping her away from blood that made her feel like she was turning into a goddess as she drank it. Her neurons fired faster than they had ever fired before as they tried to think of a way around it. Her eyes slid to the foreigner's hand.

"I think I have a idea," Kokoa said. "If I bite open your wrist, I can suck on that. That way, when you think I've taken too much, you can just pull away from me and not worry about doing anything that seems like you're attacking me."

"Do you think that'll work?"

"Of course it'll work! It's my idea, isn't it?" Kokoa got up and walked over to the foreigner. "Come here, let's try it." Kokoa tried not to sound too excited by the thought of drinking his blood again.

The foreigner looked at his wrist. "Can I trust you?" he asked, looking Kokoa in the eyes.

Kokoa tried to put as much sincerity as she could into her voice. "Yes."

He glanced at his wrist one more time before extending his forearm out to Kokoa. She grabbed it and tried to bite it, but found that she couldn't from her current position.

It took a little while, but eventually they found a way to stand and angle his arm in way that may have looked awkward, but at least Kokoa could drink from. As soon as the foreigner had agreed that it would work, Kokoa lunged forward and slit his wrist vein open. She attached her lips to the cut and began sucking, feeling her eyes start to roll back into her skull as the blood hit her tongue. Then, as quickly as she had attached herself to it, the wrist was gone. Kokoa couldn't stop the small whine that escaped her as she was denied her treat.

"Okay, it looks like that'll work," said the foreigner. "Sweet!"

"Of course it worked!" Kokoa turned her nose up, only to turn away when she realized that this meant she was now looking right into the eyes of the foreigner.

"Well, I guess all that's left is for you to hold up your side of the deal." The foreigner picked up his bag and began leaving. He spoke loudly so Kokoa could hear what he said from behind him as he walked out. "If somehow, someway, no one bothers me tomorrow, then I'll see you here at seven. That should give us a couple of hours to work on the project and then an hour for you to tutor me a little. See ya." He waved over his shoulder and left.

Kokoa took a couple of seconds to pack her bag and then ran out of the library. She had one last thing to take care of.

 **-At Kokoa's Dorm Room-**

From entering her room, to emptying her mini-fridge, to standing in front of her toilet, the vicious grin never left Kokoa's face. _May I never, EVER have to so much as look at you, again, you subpar bags of slop!_ she thought with glee as she ripped all her blood packs open and poured them into her toilet, cackling all the way. _Drown! Drown, you pathetic excuse for food! Droooown!_

* * *

A/N: The only resource I could find put Kokoa's height at 147 cm, or roughly 4 foot 10.

So, I've only got one more chapter of this written up and another outlined. I've had them for a long while, and would love to write more but I need a good beta reader to help me, and also for motivation. If any of you know a good one, especially one who's good at keeping characters in character, could you tell me?


	4. Chapter 4

Kokoa poked at the vegetable salad she had been given as part of her school lunch. She had actually bought it with the intention of eating it, even saving it for last after her rice and chicken. It was one of the few things that Kokoa was willing to admit to herself somewhat embarrassed her; she was a vampire who actively liked vegetables, some of them even more than meat. There were no real rules about it in vampire society, none that she had ever heard of at least, but it always seemed wrong to her for some reason.

Regardless, she had planned to enjoy the medley of sprouts and carrots, but when she finally got around to trying some she found herself disappointed. They were all very limp and some of the slivers tasted like they had been improperly cleaned. It was unworthy of her time and appetite. But despite this she still had to eat. She twirled the salad around in its little bowl, using her chopsticks to push it along the edges.

Because that disappointment hadn't been enough of a drag on her lunch break, she also had to deal with the inane chatter of a trio of girls who occupied the other half of the lunch table she had chosen to sit at.

 _Seriously, who cares about how your old teachers were or what your last school uniform was like?_ Kokoa asked herself. _I swear those idiots are only talking to hear the sound of their own voice._ It wasn't like Kokoa could just ignore them. They were talking so loudly and their voices were all so screechy that try as she might she just couldn't tune them out. She considered asking them to quiet down, but that would require acknowledging their existence. She had also thought about moving to a different table, but that would mean admitting defeat. So, she stayed, enduring their prattle along with her hunger.

Kokoa picked up another bite of the vegetable salad. She held it in front of her eyes, watching the long sprouts dangle and regretting not including lunch in her deal with the foreigner. Speaking of the foreigner; Kokoa glanced around the cafeteria, spotting him and checking to see if he was being attacked by anything. Nope, he was still in the exact same situation as he was in last time she checked on him, sitting alone at a table and reading a book. Kokoa felt a new pang of annoyance. She thought that she would at least get an excuse for some action as a side benefit of the deal they had made yesterday, but so far no one had bothered him. Granted this was probably mainly due to a lack of opportunity in class.

It was the second friday of the school year, the end of the first real work week they had had. As such, the teacher had decided it would be a good idea to give a test covering every subject he had talked about for the last fortnight, and have that take up the entire first half of the day. The whole class was very focused on it, even the slackers were giving it their full attention as they tried to recall what the teacher had said as they slept. Of course, Kokoa had had no problem on the test. She ignored the memories of how quickly her knee had been bouncing and the hole she had almost bitten in her lip as she took it.

Even if someone had wanted to cause trouble during the test, a bad idea given how closely the teacher watched the class to make sure he could catch any cheater, the foreigner wasn't in the room. He had been forced to take the test in another room for some reason that Kokoa couldn't be bothered to speculate on.

There suddenly came a disturbance from the other side of the lunchroom. Kokoa glanced at it and saw that the cause, to her complete lack of surprise, was the pinkette and that group she hung out with as they began trying to pull the human apart. This sight was so commonplace that she couldn't even muster up the sorrow to bury her face in her hands anymore at her sister's body being involved in such a ridiculous act. The rests of the student in the lunchroom felt the same way apparently, as almost no one was paying them any heed anymore.

 _I swear Moka, I will find a way to free you from that curse,_ Kokoa thought, reaffirming her resolve. She realized that she hadn't checked on the foreigner in a couple minutes. She turned the other way, expecting to find him still in the same position. Instead, she saw him turned around in his seat to face a large, burly third-year.

"You stop, please?" said the foreigner. In response the third-year grabbed a small chunk of rice off of his table and threw it at the foreigner. The lump bounced off his chest and hit the ground, joining other morsel that had also presumably been thrown.

The third year spoke. "What are you gonna do about it Gaijin? You gonna finally throw a punch?" Apparently, stories about the non-responsive foreigner had spread throughout the school.

The foreigner started to make like he was going to get up, and Kokoa felt a cold shock jump through her system. This was the type of thing she was supposed to be stopping, and if she failed then she wouldn't get anymore of his blood. She couldn't possibly go back to blood packs now, even if she hadn't dumped them all in the toilet. She had to act quickly.

"Hey!" said one of the prattling idiots across from Kokoa, responding to the vampire grabbing a plate off of her tray. Kokoa ignored her, there was no way she was wasting food she had paid for on what she was about to do.

Kokoa flinged the contents of the plate at the head of the upperclassman. It hit him as he was winding back a bowl to fling at the foreigner. He stopped mid-motion and turned, murder in his eyes and rice on his forehead, to see who dared do such a thing.

"You're starting to annoy me," said Kokoa, loud enough to be heard over the bustle of the cafeteria. "Stop doing that before I go over there and show you your-"

Kokoa found out what had been in the bowl the upperclassman was aiming at the foreigner. She had gotten a very good look at its contents as it sped at her chest. It was confirmed by the smell of miso that was now wafting up from the front of her shirt.

Kokoa's eyes widened and her jaw dropped agape. She looked down and pulled her shirt out in front of her, its newly acquired large, dark, and slowly spreading stain confirming to her that she hadn't imagined it. She looked up. She saw the smug smile of the imbecile who had thrown the soup at her, his mouth beginning to open.

Then, the dam burst. Kokoa felt a blaze light inside of her as her body began producing more youkai than ever before. She reached once more for the tray of the girl next to her.

What followed could have been minutes, it could have been hours, for all Kokoa knew it could even have been days. Time lost all meaning to her as she gave herself over to her rage.

Food flew everywhere as more and more students joined into the fray. The once white walls of the cafeteria were slowly dyed with every sickly shade imaginable of brown, green, yellow and red. Kokoa's entire world became grabbing whatever thing she could find on a nearby plate, or snatch out of the air, and throwing it. In her mind she was aiming every little molecular morsel dead on at the bastard who had not only stained her clothes, but also managed to disrespect not just her, but the Shuzen name, no, the entire vampire race. Her anger blinded her to the fact that, in reality, she was just throwing food in every conceivable direction.

Kokoa suddenly felt something new, a tap on her shoulder. She turned on her heel, arm raised and ready to throw a punch at who ever was stupid enough to come with range of her fist. It was just luck that she had happened to turn to look at the face of the dumbass and, even through her haze, recognized it as the foreigner. Her instinct for preserving her food source kicked in, making her try to at least divert the punch as it was too far along to stop completely. For a scary second, Kokoa thought she might not have been fast enough as she watched her hand get closer to the foreigner's cheek. However, Kokoa had clearly underestimated herself as the punch failed to connect.

The foreigner appeared nonplussed at how close he had come having his head knocked off. He looked Kokoa in the eye and began to speak. It was at this moment that the young vampire realised three things. She was somehow at eye level with the foreigner, which should have been impossible due to their height difference. This lead directly into her next discovery; over the course of her battlerage, she had for some reason decided that it made the most strategic sense to climb up and stand on top of a lunch table in the center of the room. Expending the mental energy required to register those facts made her calm down enough to make her third discovery; High school food fights are really fucking loud.

Kokoa could barely hear herself think, let alone what the foreigner was saying. She jumped down off the lunch table, nearly slipping on some orange chunks that had landed on the floor, but she managed to catch herself on the table before she fell. After checking around the room to see if she could discover who had dropped/thrown the offending fruit so she could take her revenge on them, and totally not too make sure no one had seen her nearly make an idiot of herself, she turned her attention back to the foreigner.

"What?" Kokoa asked. The foreigner bent down and cupped his hands around his mouth, amplifying his voice a bit.

"The lunch lady just left. How much you wanna bet that she went to go get the headmaster to punish whoever started this whole mess? Let's go, now."

"What?!" Kokoa turned and looked at him in shock. "Leave! Now!? Turn and run without getting my revenge on the bastard who dared throw a full bowl of soup at an elite-!"

"He left a long time ago," the foreigner said. "Like we should be, unless you wanna get into trouble?"

It pained Kokoa to flee a battle, even one as stupid as this, but he was right. As unbefitting as it would be for a member of the vampire elite to run, it would be an even greater strike against her race to get in trouble for starting a food fight, even if she was, as she felt, completely justified. "Okay."

"Great." The foreigner turned and began heading towards the door.

"Wait!" Kokoa said, her vampiric senses picking up something. "I hear people coming. We need another way out."

The foreigner looked around. "Windows!" The pair rushed to a once-clear set of the glass plates and forced them open, jumping out as soon as they had enough room. Luckily, the cafeteria was only one floor up, so they only dropped about twelve feet. Kokoa landed on her feet, while the foreigner hit the ground and rolled. "Run!" he said as they heard the noise inside the cafeteria stop, assuming it to be because of the headmaster's entrance.

The pair dashed off, heading towards the tree-studded horizon.

 **-Inside the Dead Forest-**

After running full tilt for several minutes, and now safely hidden among the leafless trees, the duo finally stopped.

Kokoa found a nice stump to sit on as she sucked in air, not even giving a passing thought to trying to look dignified. The foreigner just collapsed, sitting down hard onto the floor and laying back as soon as his butt hit dirt. For a few seconds, the only sound in the dead woods came from the two teenagers gasping for breath.

Then, laughter.

It started with the foreigner, small hiccups escaping from his throat in between gasps of air. Soon they grew louder, turning into full blown chuckles as he covered his face with his hands. Kokoa couldn't help joining in, feeling the tension escape her body, seemingly carried out by her giggles. Together, they began guffawing uncontrollably, Kokoa's eyes closing as tears began to form.

Their sudden throes of mirth continued for minutes, almost bringing them to the point of needing to gasp for air again. All good things come to an end however, and eventually, just as gradually as it started, the laughter died down. Kokoa leaned back on her stump, eyes closed, feeling the sunshine pour onto her gently smiling face, her mind completely blank for the first time in years. The foreigner's hands had shifted from being on his face to behind his head as he gazed up at the clouds through the bare branches of the forest. The only acknowledgement of time's continuing existence was the gentle swelling and contracting of their chests.

"You know what?" the foreigner asked as he sat up. He turned to face Kokoa. "I don't think I'm going back to class today."

 **-Somewhere on the Outskirts of Campus-**

It had been almost two hours since the food fight had happened and they had made their daring escape. In that time they had managed to go back to the girls dorm for Kokoa to change into clothes that didn't reek, go to the boys dorms so the foreigner could put his book away, and then wander every single inch of the perimeter of Youkai Academy's vast campus. Nearly two hours. If you were to ask either one of them how long it had been, they'd say it had maybe been ten minutes.

After they had circumnavigated the grounds, Kokoa had the idea that they could just head in a random direction and turn whenever they felt like it. They walked around, enjoying the warm friday as it was meant to be enjoyed, chatting idly outside in the sun, not in a stuffy classroom getting lectured at.

The foreigner spent much of the time telling Kokoa stories of what he had done back in the U.S.A.. The current one was of the first time he had cut class, when he was eleven.

"So we had really wanted to watch this movie, I can't even remember what it was now, and it came out on a friday. We didn't want to wait to watch it until saturday, so we decided that we would go to school and get logged into the attendance, then leave when we had the chance. We thought we would go out, see the movie, and then get back.

"We took the bus all around town, trying to get to this theater. See, Steven had printed out a sheet of directions the other day, and we were following him following those. Or we thought he was following those."

"He didn't have the directions?" Kokoa asked.

"No, he had them. They were even right. But he wasn't. The first step was getting onto the twenty-three inbound. We went to the street corner, saw the bus across the street, and thought that was our bus, because it was there already." Kokoa made a confused face at this logic. "Yeah, I know," said the foreigner "We were dumb kids. So anyway, we hopped on and rode that bus for twenty minutes in the exact wrong direction. We never even realized it, we rode all the way to the terminal at the end and, since we were told to get off, assumed it was our stop and that everyone else was going to watch the movie too.

"We went out and then spent almost an hour trying to find a street that was across town."

Kokoa laughed. "That's what you deserve for following someone blindly like that."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in," the foreigner said in mock hurt, ruined by his smile. "So anyways, we eventually figured out we were lost and found our ways back home unharmed."

"Your parents didn't have to find you?" Kokoa asked.

"Nope, we weren't that dumb. But that was the problem.

"You see, we didn't take into account the fact that our parents thought we were at school, so when they tried to pick us up and didn't find us, they threw a fit! The school was swarmed with cops, all the teachers were being interrogated, we had caused pandemonium and we had no idea. It wasn't until our parents came home, way late at night, that we found out what had happened."

"How much trouble did you get in?" Kokoa asked gleefully.

"Alllll of it! We were grounded for months, suspended for weeks, made to apologize to every person in the school for causing them distress, it was ridiculous!"

Kokoa laughed. The foreigner looked at her crossly before laughing with her. "What about you? You ever done something stupid?"

Kokoa froze, but quickly started walking again with her nose in the air. "Oh please, a vampire elite like me would never make such a stupid mistake like that."

"That's a yes."

"No!" Kokoa turned and pouted at him, a light blush dusting her cheeks. The foreigner looked at her and let out a small chuckle at her expression. He looked towards the ground and shook his head, covering his mouth with a hand.

"Yeah, well-"

 ***Caw-Caw***

"What was that?" The pair looked up towards the sky and saw a black speck circling above them. No, not circling above, spiraling down towards them. It got closer and closer, faster and faster. It became clear it was some kind of bird attempting to dive bomb them. It flew down in front of them, causing both to flinch when it suddenly stopped mid air just over a foot in front of Kokoa's eyes. Now that it wasn't moving, they could see a white envelope in its beak.

There was an awkward silence as they looked at the bird who was either on very good terms with gravity or had managed to piss it off to the point it not wanting to have anything to do with it, and so was able to be suspended in the air.

"Uhh…, yes?" asked the foreigner.

The bird didn't respond.

The foreigner thought maybe the bird didn't understand him. "Hai?" he asked, trying japanese.

Apparently ravens can roll their eyes. This one chose to exercise this ability before swiftly slapping Kokoa's face and the foreigner's chest with the letter.

As the paper made impact, the world seemed to melt around them. The blue of the sky bled into black and the horizon shrunk and warped until it became a flat wall. A dark mass seemed to take form in front of them.

"Hello there," said the headmaster as his glowing eyes leered at them from behind his desk. "Please, take a seat." He pointed behind the transported teens at the small chairs he had placed in his office. He reached down and pulled a remote out of one of the desk drawers, which he aimed behind himself and pushed a button. A massive television screen flickered to life, displaying a still image of the cafeteria from earlier in the day.

"We are going to be here for awhile." The headmaster pushed play.

* * *

 **-Several Minutes Later-**

Kokoa watched as she and the foreigner dove out the windows, moments before the cafeteria doors opened and the headmaster strode in. It had been a disconcerting experience to say the least, watching herself fly off the handle in complete silence like that. The discomfort she felt was not helped by the gaze of the headmaster's glowing eyes as he looked at the two of them as they observed the security camera footage over his shoulder with that chilling smile of his.

The headmaster chose this moment to lift up the remote once more and cut the power to the tv. Kokoa blinked rapidly, her eyes adjusting to the dim candle light being her only vision source as opposed to the bright screen. Once her eyelids stopped fluttering, she turned her attention to the headmaster, only to find him already staring at her. She fought down her impulse to gulp.

The headmaster finally spoke. "Public misconduct, assault with multiple foodstuffs and dinnerware, inciting a food fight, and stealing that foodstuff and dinnerware from several students," he said as though he was reading off of a grocery list. "And that is to say nothing of you fleeing to avoid disciplinary action and skipping half of a school day." The headmaster paused momentarily. Kokoa couldn't help squirming a little in her seat.

"While it was admirable of you to stand up for your classmate, I am afraid that your actions demand some very heavy consequences, not the least of which will be you refunding the students whose food you stole. Do you understand?"

Kokoa clenched her teeth. She glared at the headmaster, looking deep into the glow of his eyes until she was forced to look away. She diverted her gaze to her shoes as she took a deep breath and tightly gripped the bottom of the chair she was sitting on. The teenaged vampire tersely nodded as she pressed deep grooves into the plastic.

The headmaster turned his attention to the foreigner. "Now as for you," he said, switching to english as he addressed the slouching boy. "I must commend you on staying out of the affair entirely, I'm sure that must have been very difficult for you."

Kokoa started in her chair as a wave of intense youkai briefly crashed over her. The headmaster continued as though he hadn't noticed.

"It was very clever of you to convince your friend to remove herself from the premises to avoid capture when you noticed the absence of Ms. Fuzuka, but this obstruction of justice also requires punishment. Do you understand?"

A couple of seconds passed with no response. Kokoa looked up and saw the headmaster looking at the foreigner next to her. There was something off about his usual glowing smile. Kokoa swore that she saw one of the corners of his lips shudder for a nanosecond. She turned to see what caused this break in character, and just saw a normal fifteen-year-old boy glowering at authority. The silence continued for a little bit longer, before it was finally broken by the foreigner.

"What's going to happen to the as- the one who was throwing food at me?" he asked.

"Ah, you are referring to Mr. Ito?" asked the headmaster as he looked down at a file on his desk. "He will be punished appropriately, do not worry about that."

The foreigner looked down and to the side as he forced air out through grit teeth. His fist began to clench.

"Now then," said the headmaster, looking up from his files again. "There is the matter of what form your punishment will take." Kokoa pressed herself into her chair as the headmaster's smile grew even wider. "Fortunately, Mr. Akawa has provided me with an idea."

 **-In the Cafeteria-**

"Aagh!" Kokoa screamed in anger. She had planted her knee down into some curdled salad dressing when she kneeled to scrub a stain off of the floor. "I can't believe I am being required to do such lowly work!" she said as she walked over to one of the soapy water buckets to wash the sauce off.

"Yeah well," said the foreigner as he dumped a bag of trash into one of the big, black, plastic bins they had been provided to place the garbage in. "Look at it this way, we're almost done." He looked around the room and took the progress they had made over the last hour and a half. It was now possible to see through the windows again, the room no longer smelled like a sewer, and the walls had stopped resembling a modern art piece and returned to their usual blank white. Really, all that was left was a bit of mopping and stain removal, along with picking up a few stray scraps of trash.

This did nothing to stop Kokoa's grumbling. "Stupid, menial, useless…" The foreigner had learned to tune her out.

"Oh yeah," he said, suddenly remembering something as he plunged a mop into the soapy bucket. He looked at Kokoa, who was still bent over rubbing her knee raw. "Thanks for helping me out there."

"What?" Kokoa asked, looking up from her washing briefly as her brain processed what was said. "Oh." She looked back down. "Oh please, don't act like it's some big deal. That was the agreement we had made and I honored it. A highborn vampire like myself would never go back on a deal like that." _Especially not when the pay is so delicious._

"Yeah, speaking of the deal." The foreigner rolled up his sleeve and presented it to Kokoa. The vampire looked up as the sweet nectar trapped inside was placed within range of her fangs. She quickly licked the inside of her lips. "It's technically after school. Do want to take it now or later?"

 _Take it take it take it take it_ , said the primal part of her. _No, you idiot! Deal with the hunger for now. Or would you rather go to sleep hungry?_ Kokoa tore her eyes away from his wrist. "No. No, I'll take it later."

The foreigner nodded, rolled his sleeve back down and got to mopping. A thought suddenly struck Kokoa as she stood up and caught sight of his neck.

"Why didn't you run?" she asked.

"Well," the foreigner said as he coated the floor in soapy water. "I would've felt bad if you had gotten into trouble for protecting me. Which you did anyways, so, you know… Sti-"

"That's not what I meant." Kokoa self-consciously ran her tongue under her fangs. "Last night, when I couldn't stop feeding off you, why didn't you run?"

The foreigner stopped mopping and stood, slack jawed and wide-eyed as he marveled at his own stupidity. He slapped the heel of his palm to his forehead. "Oh, why the fuck didn't I, you could've been a psycho!" Kokoa felt a pang of something in her chest. She decided it was anger.

 _How dare he even imply that a vampire elite like myself could ever be some kind of psychopath!_ she thought as the foreigner continued to berate himself. The thought felt forced even to Kokoa. _I mean, I stopped once I let go. And I would've been able to stop myself. Eventually._

The foreigner spoke to her once more, snapping her out of her thoughts. "Yeah, you're right." Kokoa had never thought being called right could possibly put a damper on her mood. "Sorry, I'm still not used to running away being my only option now." He went back to mopping.

Kokoa looked down. She tried to think of something to make herself feel better.

Suddenly, Kokoa picked up sounds of someone tearing up the hallway outside. The door burst open and a very angry third-year came storming in. His eyes swept the room before zeroing in on Kokoa. "You!" he screamed. "I missed my date because of you!" He roared at the top of his lungs as he ran towards the redhead, his clothes ripping away from his body as he transformed into an ogre. He threw a punch at her, ready to watch as her torso went flying up into the air. He was left dumbfounded as his fist ceased all movement. It wasn't responding to any new commands his brain sent it either. It refused to budge. Rather, the vampire sadistically smiling as she held the fist in a tight grip refused to let it budge.

"Thank you," the foreigner said over his shoulder. He moved the water bucket out of the way of the angry seventeen-year-old.

The third year tried to yank his hand out of her death grip. He twisted his arm, nothing. He tried pulling on it with his other hand, nada. He tried falling down, pulling on it with all his weight, no result. Finally, he tried taking another swing at her. As soon as his left arm began its forward momentum, Kokoa threw him across the room. She had meant to bury him deep in the wall, but instead,

"Hey!" said the foreigner. "I just cleaned all that!"

Instead the ogre hit one of the trash cans. He tried to scramble to his feet, slipping and sliding around on the trash underneath him as Kokoa slowly approached him.

 _Get ready to be shown your place, vermin,_ she thought as she cracked her knuckles. _Under my heel._ Kokoa summoned Kou, transforming him into a sledgehammer. She swung it like a golf club, using her vampire strength and speed to slam it into the ogre's ribs three times before he flew out of range, and away from all the trash cans.

Now unhindered by the presence of slippery litter, the ogre was able to get to his feet easier. "You bitch!" he roared. "I'm going to kill you!" He rushed at Kokoa, ready to bowl her over, fists already raised into the appropriate position to being punching her once she was on the floor. His plans were foiled when Kokoa, still smiling, slid to the side just before he hit her. She quickly turned Kou into a crowbar and swung it at his knees. The ogre collapsed to the ground and immediately began rolling around, clutching at his dislocated kneecaps.

Kokoa stood over him and grabbed him by the shoulder, forcing him to stand up. She let go of him once he was up, making him endure the pain of putting all his weight onto dislocated knees. She turned Kou into a baseball bat and began winding up. The ogre's eyes went wide and he tried to hobble away, but he couldn't shamble fast enough to escape before Kokoa swung at him.

She hit him so hard he went flying away, going straight towards the trashcans again but looking like he would pass above an open one. Kokoa ran after him, then caught to him in midair, then ran past him to stand next to the trashcan. She lifted the bat over her head. Once the ogre had reached her, she brought it down onto his hips, bending him in half and shoving him into the half-filled trash can. Only the top of his head was sticking out. The ogre looked up through eyes blurred with pain, seeing the upside-down outline of Kokoa as she eclipsed the ceiling lights.

She reached for the lid and held it over his head. "Take this time to enjoy being around your own kind," she said. And with that, she lifted the lid and slammed it down, knocking him out with the hard plastic edge.

Kou, by this time a bat once more, spoke. "This fight lasted for two minutes, fourteen seconds." He flew back into Kokoa's bag.

The foreigner closed the lid on the trashcan he had been refilling. "Thanks for dealing with him again," he said. "And for keeping him away from making any more of a mess."

Kokoa turned to him. "Again with the "thank you"s," she said. "I thought American's were supposed to be rude?"

"My dad's from Norway, I guess the gene's been diluted."

Kokoa rolled her eyes. "If he had knocked anything over, I would've had to clean it up too. And I am not doing that over again!" she said, angry at the very notion.

The foreigner looked at the trashcan she had just stuffed the bastard in. "Still, a seventeen-year-old. That's impressive."

Kokoa scoffed and flipped her hair. "It was nothing! Compared to a Vampire he might as well have been a toddler." Still, she couldn't keep a small smile off of her face. She turned away to keep him from seeing it.

The foreigner looked around the cafeteria. "You know what," he said as he lifted up the mop bucket. "I think this place is about done." He dumped the dirty mop water into the drinking fountain. He turned back to Kokoa. "You wanna go work on the project right now?"

Kokoa was about to say yes, before she caught herself. _No, what are you thinking? Have you forgotten already, idiot? You have to go look into those rumors about the werewolf!_ Kokoa thought, reminding her of what she was supposed to do for newspaper club. "No, I have a thing to do. So-" _What are you doing?!_ Kokoa stopped herself before she could say sorry. She looked down in shock that the idea even crossed her mind.

The foreigner nodded and said, "Okay. So, meet up at the library at seven?"

"Absolutely." Kokoa was surprised at the enthusiasm of her response. _Why wouldn't I be enthusiastic! Just thinking about having that blood flowing down my throat again, setting my body on fire, making my hair stand on end, why didn't I take it earlier again?_

"Okay, then," said the foreigner. "I'll see you later…" The foreigner paused and concentrated for a second, before turning sheepish. "I just realized, I don't know your name. Mine's Vlad Drakyich." He extended a hand to her. "Nice to meet you, I guess."

Kokoa looked at his hand funny. _Who is he, to think he can act that familiar with a vampire?_ she thought, almost as a reflex. _Shut up, he has the blood. That's a good enough reason to be humoring him like this right? Right? Right._

The vampire took Vlad's hand and shook it. "Kokoa Shuzen." She was surprised at how easily her next words came out. "Nice to meet you."

* * *

A/N:

When I first wrote this, it was spring of 2015. These four chapters are all I have written. I decided to finally post them up and see the response, and I'm quite happy with it. I'll try and continue the story, but updates will be coming much slower. Thank you for reading and enjoying my story.


	5. Chapter 5

_I can't believe I never noticed just how many shades of shadow there are_ , Kokoa thought, revelling in the heightened sense of sight she currently possessed. The shadows revolved around her feet, cast by the tall lampposts lining the cobblestone path between the library and the dorms, brightening and dimming as her proximity to the individual light sources changed. Her eyes were glued to the ground, her focus consumed by the orbiting silhouettes.

It was something she had noticed after the first couple of times she had fed upon Vlad, a temporary sharpening of her already heightened vampiric senses. Usually she did it before they started working on the project so she could focus better, but this time she choose to save it until afterwards as a treat.

"I am going to be so happy when we finally turn that project in. Just seven more days and we never have to think about it again," Vlad said as he threw his empty juice box into a garbage can along the path, the remnant of a treat of his own. He had started bringing snacks along to replenish his blood after Kokoa drank from him, but the rule about food in the library meant he had to consume them during their walk back. His attempt to continue talking was cut off by a loud yawn.

"It's only ten pm," Kokoa said, glancing at him with slight smirk. "I thought America was the country that never sleeps?"

"That's just New York, and from what I hear that's not really by choice."

"Well, don't fall asleep here. It'd be inconvenient for me to have to either stay out all night to guard you or drag you to your dorm room."

"And god forbid you be inconvenien- **yawn** "

Kokoa smugly tsked at him. "Can you really not handle such a short walk?"

"Short my ass. This campus is huge! Seriously, I thought Poe was…" Vlad's face fell.

An awkward silence rose between the two, bringing Kokoa slightly down from her mini-high; an unacceptable occurrence to the vampire who was acutely aware of how short they were and the fact she could only experience them once a day.

 _Ugh, what could distract him?_ she thought. Her mind cast out and recalled a story she had heard earlier that day, in the so-called "newspaper" club room. Normally she ignored everything that went on in that wretched area, blocking out all but the telltale sound of her elder sister being released from her prison, but today something strange happened. The pink-haired imposter and her friends had actually managed to stop fighting over the human. The sheer novelty of the situation was enough to get Kokoa to pay heed. And if the story could, after a fashion, capture _her_ attention, then surely it would enthral a lower-class monster like whatever Vlad was.

"Did you hear about the incidents around campus?" Kokoa asked.

Vlad straightened up and looked at her, apparently also wishing to end the awkward silence. He made a noise that Kokoa took as an indication to keep talking, not that she needed his permission to do so.

"A bunch of weaklings have been found laying around on campus, clearly having picked a fight with a superior foe and suffering the consequences. Left them with nightmares. It seems they were beaten so badly that when they woke up they were..."

"...They were?" Vlad said.

Kokoa's mind was racing, her knowledge of english having failed her in this instance. _What is that stupid word. That stupid word in this stupid language._ She opened her mouth slightly and nearly made an uhm noise, a worthless time filler that she had been taught was unbefitting of a noble vampire to make in speech. Thinking quickly, Kokoa found the word she was looking for. "Faceless."

Vlad stopped in his tracks and looked at her, bewildered. "They had their faces torn off?! And they woke up afterwards?"

Evidently it was not the word she was looking for. Stupid language, it had none of the elegance of japanese. Kokoa kept walking, turning her nose up and acting like she had meant to say that. Before she could continue her story, Vlad spoke up.

"What's that?" he said as he looked off of the path, squinting into the darkness of the forest.

Following his gaze lead Kokoa's eyes to what looked like an unconscious person on the ground. A girl with short black hair and impressively pale skin. There was a shadow on top of her that looked like it was moving, spreading to cover almost all of the body.

Kokoa shrugged. Not her problem. She turned around and kept walking, making it a few steps before she realized that Vlad was not following her. Looking back over her shoulder, Kokoa could see Vlad going off of the road and towards the fallen girl.

"Hey!" Vlad called out, presumably to either the shadow or the girl.

Kokoa rolled her eyes. "If you put yourself into danger," she said, "I'm not getting you out it. It's your own fault."

Vlad made no indication he had heard her as he walked up to the shadow, which had stopped moving.

 _Idiot,_ Kokoa thought as she started to resume her walk. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the shadow start to peel off of the body. _Well, hopefully he won't get killed. His blood is too delicious to lose._ The thought made Kokoa stop in her tracks. She turned her head just enough to be able to observe the situation, to make sure her supply wasn't permanently lost to her. But it seemed there was no danger, the shadow had started to slither off of the body.

Kokoa scoffed. _Cowards, every one of them. Every single creature at this pathetic schoo-_ her train of thought was cut off by a brief flash of shock which was itself swallowed in a flood of pure rage.

The shadow had attempted to flee, running across the path behind her. As it passed, Kokoa felt the unmistakeable sensation of someone lifting up the back of her skirt. It felt a lot like someone signing their own death warrant.

As soon as her skirt was lifted the shadow ran away, traveling remarkably fast for a two dimensional being. Then again, anything would move quickly if it had a powerful, enraged vampire in pursuit.

* * *

While her shade led the girl away, the boy walked over to Rumiko. Just as she had planned. She felt his hand touch her shoulder and opened her eyes. The dream eater couldn't stop a sneer from appearing on her face, so she hid it behind a smile as she rolled over to see her prey.

"You okay?" the boy asked. The words came out slow and unsure. Rumiko's sneer grew. A simple mind made for easy prey. "Thing attack you. You okay?"

"Thank you, I'm fine," said Rumiko. Her voice thickened and distorted as she spoke, layering her words with yoki. "But tell me," She looked into his eyes. "What do you fear most?"

* * *

Kokoa wouldn't allow herself to gasp for breath. Her body hadn't earned it. Clearly it wasn't sprinting as fast as it could if this scrap of darkness was outpacing her. Worse, it seemed to be toying with her. Slowing down just enough for her to nearly step on it before speeding up again.

 _I am the greatest predator in creation! How is this perverted thing outrunning me?_ Her lungs burned and her eyes stung with sweat.

 _What kind of vampire allows herself to be outrun by a mere shadow!_

* * *

Rumiko's mouth watered in anticipation as she waited for the boy's eyes to glaze over, for him to come under her illusion, for his emotions and yoki to start flowing into her body.

...Any second now.

The boy's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "Sorry, what you say?"

Rumiko blinked. Maybe she didn't put enough into it the first time. "What do you fear most?" she asked again, forcing even more power into her words.

"Sorry, sorry, I japanese not good," The boy said. "Please, slow?"

The dream eater couldn't believe it. Her magic required the target to register her words so thoughts of their fears would start bubbling up. This idiot was too stupid for it to work on him.

He reached out a hand to try to help her up but she swatted it away.

Rumiko grit her teeth and tried again, speaking slower. "What. Do. You. Fear?"

"I- I- I not understand. You voice so…" the idiot made a gesture with his hand as he tried to find the word he was looking for. "Not standard?"

Rumiko could feel a headache coming on. To make matters worse, the timer on her shade was about to run out.

* * *

 _Just a bit faster. Just a bit faster. Just a bit- where did it go?_ Kokoa stopped in her tracks. _No, no, no! It must be hiding somewhere._ Her eyes darted around the trees, the roots, the rocks, anywhere a shadow could conceal itself this late at night. _It can't have disappeared! It can't have gotten away!_ But try as Kokoa might, no matter how much she strained her eyes she could not find the moving shadow. She had to face reality. It had escaped. She had lost.

Kokoa felt her knees buckle and she nearly collapsed, but through sheer force of pride she kept herself standing. _What is wrong with me! If it had been Moka she would've captured it before it had even got off of the path! Even the imposter would have been able to stop it! This can't be all I can do! It can't be! It can't!_

The stinging in Kokoa's eyes got worse as her sweat mingled with tears. She wanted to run away, to hide her shame. She wanted to wake up in her bed from this nightmare. She wanted her sister. But her sister was still trapped in a prison that she wasn't strong enough to break her out of. Another failure. What else could she screw up.

She reached for her phone. Inside it was a picture of Moka. The real Moka. It always helped her feel better when nothing else could. But her phone wasn't with her. It was in her bag, which she had dropped when she chased the shadow. With a sniff she turned around and started heading back towards the path to collect her things.

* * *

This was getting intolerable. Rumiko had repeated herself slowly, quickly, and with as little yoki as she could put into her voice and still have the spell work. The idiot still didn't understand. She was about ready to cut her losses when the idiot started digging around in his pocket.

"Wait," he said. "I have the idea." He pulled out a phone and opened up an app. "Speak to this."

Rumiko rolled her eyes and was about to give it one last try when she heard footsteps coming from the forest. She glanced at the source and saw the girl from early, her head down as she shuffled towards the path. Rumiko's eyes widened. Even from this far away she could feel the girl positively dripping with emotion. Her sneer returned. Maybe the night would not be a waste after all.

The idiot looked at the girl and started to speak in a language she couldn't understand, but no matter. He didn't get to say much before Rumiko cut him off.

"What do you fear most?" she nearly shouted at the girl.

* * *

Kokoa heard someone call her name and blearily looked up. It was Vlad, he was still there with the other girl. Kokoa hastily wiped her eyes, no need for anyone else to see the state she was in. Before Vlad could finish what he was saying, the girl yelled at her.

 _What a stupid question,_ Kokoa thought bitterly. She had no time to deal with idiocy. She was about to tell the stupid girl off when she saw a flicker of movement on the ground. The shadow was standing right in the middle of the path! Without a thought, Kokoa dove for it.

Kokoa had expected the shadow to once again flee but instead it merely slid to the side, avoiding her pounce. She kicked out at it, but the darkness seemed to effortlessly dodge her. A loud roar ripped out of her throat. This thing was not escaping her, not again.

She dove at it, swung out and faked motions at the shadow, but always it danced just out of her attack. As her frustration reached a boiling point, she wrenched a stone out of the path and threw it at the shadow with all her might. It hit and buried itself into the road, pinning down the shadow.

"I have you!" she yelled in triumph. She jumped on the darkness, planting both of her feet right over its heart but the shadow had no reaction. She stomped down on it several times, but to no apparent effect.

Getting down on all fours, Kokoa began punching. Her strikes dug out massive chunks of road. Dust and gravel blew into her hair and eyes but she did not let it deter her from her moment of triumph. But no matter how hard she hit, the shadow did not react. If anything her punches seemed to be doing less damage, at least to the road. From blowing holes in the ground to cracking the rocks to not even loosening the stones she had struck.

This lack of reaction infuriated Kokoa. How dare this stupid thing deny her the pleasure of seeing it torn to pieces. She was a vampire! The strength of her species was the stuff of legends! She grabbed the shadow and threw it against a tree, raining blows upon it as it stuck to the wood. Hooks, jabs, uppercuts, nothing was doing anything.

 _No._

Her attacks weren't even enough to make the tree rustle.

 _No._

She gathered up all of her strength for one final blow. Put all of her yoki into her fist and sent it right at the center of the shade. The only result was a stinging in her knuckles.

 _No._

How could this be. She was… weak.

There was a soft thump as Kokoa's knees hit the dirt, the small sting not even registering through her tears. She tried to look up at the shadow but all she saw was darkness. To the left, to the right, above and below; an empty void.

An authoritative voice rung out. "Hey!"

Kokoa looked up. She knew that voice. "Y- yes?" she asked. Before her stood her sister, her real sister, in all her silver-haired glory.

* * *

The idiot seemed confused at the sight of his friend diving for nothing. He spoke again but Rumiko had had enough of the sound of his voice. As he turned away from her, she sprang up and wrapped her arms around his neck and legs against his waist, pulling him to the ground in a choke hold.

His hand shot up towards her arms to defend himself, but stopped just short of touching her. Rumiko did not even register the strangeness of his lack of resistance, her eyes were fixed upon the thrashing girl in the middle of the road. The idiot started trying to wriggle his way out of her grip, but she merely tightened it. "I have been waiting all day to feed!" she hissed into his ear. "You will not ruin this for me!"

As the illusion grew more powerful the girl went from pounding the road to pawing at it to simply lying down, motionless. Her eyes were the only part of her that seemed to have any life in them at all, wide open and darting around. Rumiko closed her eyes and sighed as she felt the power flow into her.

The idiot opened his mouth to try and yell but he could only gurgle from the lack of oxygen, and soon he couldn't even do that. His wriggling lessened and she could feel his heart slowing.

"Don't bother trying to save her, it's pointless," she said. "It would take more than your pathetic whining to break my illusion. Nothing you could say to her could reach her now. Now shut up and let me enjoy my meal."

The idiot said something that she didn't understand, but he sounded more annoyed than fearful. The show of insolence made Rumiko tighten her grip around his neck even more. He stopped flailing but Rumiko knew his heart was still beating too fast to be unconscious. She didn't loosen her hold even a little.

His arm went up again and Rumiko watched it carefully, ready to dodge out of the way of any strikes. But the limb came nowhere near her. Instead he pressed the back of his arm to his lips. She ignored it. Who knew why idiots did what they did. Her attention returned to savoring her meal.

* * *

Kokoa pounced at her sister, trying to hug her only to be smacked down out of the air. Of course, Moka was far too dignified for such a thing. Kokoa stood back up and smiled at her sister.

"Who do you think you are, smiling at me like that," Moka said. "Know your place. Now listen up. I am looking for my little sister. Do you know where she is?"

Kokoa was taken aback. "Wh- what do you mean? I'm your sister!" she said.

Moka scowled at her. "Do not lie to me. Now, where is she?"

"I'm right here! Please, sister-"

"My sister," Moka said firmly, "is a vampire."

"I am a vampire!"

"No vampire is as pathetic as you."

Kokoa was left speechless. She tried to defend herself, but she couldn't summon any words. Even if she could, what was there to say in her defense? She felt her eyes start to sting again and looked away from her sister. She didn't deserve to cry in front of Moka. She turned around and tried to walk away.

"Well?" said the headmaster.

Kokoa jolted at the sound. She looked in front of her. There was now a desk, and behind it sat the headmaster. Kokoa was sitting in a chair opposite him.

"Well?" he repeated.

"W- what?" stammered Kokoa.

"Ms. Shuzen, if you wish to enroll at this academy we must know what form of monster you are so proper accommodations can be made."

"I'm a vampire!"

"Please, stop fooling around Ms. Shuzen. We really don't have the time for it."

"I am a vampire!" she screamed. She grabbed his desk and tried to throw it at him, but the wood did not budge.

"You're awfully weak for a vampire. Ms. Shuzen, impersonation will not be tolerated here."

Kokoa's mind raced. She was a vampire! There had to be some way to prove it. "Here! Here," she pulled up her upper lip to reveal her teeth. "You see? Fangs! I am a vampire!" she said, pleadingly. Shame filled her being. It was seen as unsightly in vampire society to draw attention to your fangs. This was what she had been reduced too.

"What fangs?" the headmaster coolly asked.

"What?" Kokoa ran her tongue over her upper teeth. No fangs. Just flat useless blocks where her fangs should be. She collapsed into the chair. "No. N- no. No."

"So, what are you?"

"I- I- I- I don't kno-"

Suddenly the desk and the headmaster flickered, just for an instant.

 _What was that?_

She breathed in. It happened again. Kokoa closed her eyes and ears and focused on her breathing and she became aware of… something. Something at the edge of her consciousness. A scent. She took inhaled deeply through her nose and and the scent flooded her mind as all her worries seemed to fall away, replaced by a primal hunger.

 _ **Blood.**_

* * *

Rumiko couldn't believe her eyes. _How… How can this happen?_ The body of the girl on the road, right as she was finishing her meal, it had jolted. At first she had thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, but it happened again. And again. Then the girl started moving towards her.

"Stay away!" she shouted. "Stay away!"

* * *

Kokoa let the smell take over all of her faculties. She reached a hand out and started pulling herself towards it, inching along. The smell got stronger. Soon she was pulling herself along with both hands. As she got closer she felt her vampiric strength return to her, little by little. Her tongue could feel her fangs in her mouth once more as she got onto all fours, charging towards the source.

Her sight began to return to her, little by little. First just light but soon she could see blobs before her. The scent seemed to direct her towards one blob in specific. She rushed towards it. Panicked shouts filled the air but she ignored them. Finally her hand made contact with something other than rock or dirt. Cloth carrying the warmth of the flesh inside of it. The scent became more specific, more familiar.

 _Vlad._

* * *

The girl had crawled all the way over to them and Rumiko was paralyzed with fear. "Go away! Go away or I'll… I'll… I'll kill him!" She tried to tighten her grip on the idiots neck even more but she couldn't.

The girl put her hand on the idiot's leg and her head began moving upwards. From the corner of Rumiko's eye she could see a patch of red coming up at her. The idiot had bitten deep into his arm, and blood was flowing from it like a river. He held his arm up, right in front of her face, and the girl's hands reached up towards it. She tried to move away but the idiot dodged his head to the side and left her without cover. The girl reached out to Rumiko's face.

* * *

Kokoa felt a nose. Lips. Cheeks.

"Get her."

She struck.

Her knuckles slammed into one of those cheeks and what was left of the illusion shattered as the caster fell backwards. Her arms loosened from around Vlad's neck and he fell to the side, coughing and hacking and rubbing his throat. But Kokoa paid him no attention. Her focus was firmly on the girl. _An illusion! Of course._

The girl had just enough time to look up after the blow to see another fist rocketing towards her. And then another. And then another. To say nothing of the kicks.

Kokoa attacked her again and again, until she could not muster even a token attempt at defense. But the barrage did not stop. Bones broke under her fists and she took aim at the black-haired girls throat, ready to end it all for good. But something stopped her.

Her father's words rang out in her mind: " _To kill your opponent is to grant them a compliment. To admit to them that there was no other way to end the fight._ "

Her fist buried itself into the dirt. Kokoa looked down at the illusioner. "You don't deserve it. You aren't worthy."

For several seconds she stayed over the illusioner, her anger slowly fading but bringing nothing to replace it. A loud hack got her attention and she stood up, walking over to Vlad.

She crouched down next to him, silent.

"Thank you," Vlad eventually said when he stopped wheezing. He sat up and looked at the girl. "So, what should we do with her?"

"I don't care," Kokoa mumbled.

Vlad nodded and tried to stand up, wincing when he pushed himself up with his bleeding arm. "Ugh, definitely too deep."

Kokoa had no response as she stood with him.

Vlad looked at her. Their eyes met just long enough for her to register the fact they held an amount of concern for her. It was enough for her to turn her whole body away from him. _Don't pity me,_ she thought. But she couldn't find it within herself to give voice to the thought.

"Are you okay?" Vlad asked.

 _I'm fine,_ Kokoa wanted to say. She knew it would be too obvious of a lie. "I'm tired," she said instead.

"...Okay."

Kokoa started to leave but something stopped her. The scent that had pulled her out of the illusion was still present, still flooding her olfactory facilities. "You're bleeding," she said as she turned back around.

"Really, I hadn't noticed," Vlad drily said. "I'll get it patched up, don't worry." He tried to wave her off.

"I can help it," Kokoa said as she reached for his wrist.

Vlad pulled his wrist away from her, confused. "What do you mean?"

"Give me your arm. My saliva has healing powers, that's why you don't keep bleeding after I bite you." Kokoa didn't know why she was explaining this to him. She had made the offer and he seemed to refuse.

Vlad hesitated, but nodded. "Okay." He gave Kokoa his wrist.

She turned his arm outwards up and leaned in towards it. As she got closer to the source to his blood she wanted to dive for it, to latch onto the wound and drink until she felt full again. But she kept her greed in check. When she got close enough she spat onto the wound. Almost immediately the holes punctured in the flesh by Vlad's teeth started to narrow. Without a thought Kokoa used her other hand to rub in the saliva, helping the mending go faster.

The pair stood in silence as the healing took place. It wasn't until the holes has been reduced to almost invisible scars that Kokoa stopped rubbing.

"Thanks," Vlad said, breaking the silence. "It feels better now." He started to go away, but Kokoa didn't let go of his wrist. Vlad turned back.

"...Thank you," Kokoa said in a small voice, her head still low and her bangs covering her eyes.

"You're welcome. Look, I'll deal with this piece of shit. You can go get some sleep."

Kokoa nodded and let go of him. With all debts settled, she picked up her bag from the middle of the road and started walking back to her dorm.

"Good night, Kokoa," Vlad called after her. "See you tomorrow."

Kokoa waved at him in response as she left. For the entire trip back her phone remained in her bag, unopened.

* * *

A/N: Sorry for there not being an update for so long. College is hard. It hasn't gotten easier, so I can't promise when the next update will come. Probably not soon.

When Kokoa said faceless, the word she was looking for was emotionless.


End file.
